With the popularity of Scrum, ScrumMaster has become a de facto role on many agile projects.

In this thought-provoking session, we’ll explore the ScrumMaster role and its key challenges. We’ll discuss why teams end up with dysfunctional ScrumMasters, and how that hurts agile projects. We’ll explore common ScrumMaster anti-patterns, and why they occur. We’ll challenge the ScrumMaster role, compare it to other models, and address if agile teams really need a ScrumMaster.

This promises to be a lively and interactive session that may change your views on how to structure a Scrum team.

Not long ago the notion of a tool that hides more of the system than it shows sounded crazy. To some it still does. But hundreds of thousands of Mylyn users have made next big evolution of the IDE clear. Stories and tasks are more central than source code, focus is more important than features, and integration with the agile workflow is the biggest productivity boost since code completion. This talk will demonstrate the concepts of the task-focused interface and look ahead at how we are redefining the “I” of the IDE by personalizing the user experience around the agile process.

As agile coaches, we all face impediments when it comes to making agile transformations happen in an organization. Dealing with corporate bureaucracy is most times the hardest part of the transition. So, what about the federal government and all that red tape? Learn how two coaches have made it happen, leading and coaching an enterprise agile adoption (principally Scrum and FDD) at two agencies within the federal government space. Think you’ve dealt with bureaucracy? Come hear what it’s like to deal with the ultimate in corporate bureaucracy!

A series of cartoons depicts the terrible things that happen when agile practices aren’t followed. This session is valid for any persona, but especially for the product owner who will suffer when their product fails because they follow a process that isn’t helping their team deliver!

Agile development means self-management, collaboration, and working towards shared goals. Agile practices support much of this, but we can still learn more, both to better understand current practices and to develop new ones. This session is an introduction to cultural-historical activity theory, a psychological framework for understand collaborative behaviour. The framework has shown the role of tools in cognition and collaboration, and understanding structural tension between different activity systems: it can also be used to understand and improve agile software development.

Leading an agile development team; what is the role, what’s important, what to do, and how to lead. This is based on my experience in leading a large (600+ people) application development organization that has been practicing Agile since 2001. Over the past eight years I’ve observed, coached, and developed Agile leaders. In my talk I’ll cover the attributes of the successful Agile leader. I will use real life examples that illustrate and validate the attributes that can help or hinder the process of leading an Agile team. Leadership versus management will also be discussed.

How do you do sprint planning meetings when you have, for example, 60 people and 8 teams working on the same product? One neat way is to get them all into the same room and do them together. This is a great way to stimulate collaboration and resolve dependencies - but there are some important practical aspects to take into consideration. Having done this with several different companies over the past few years I’d like to share some experiences and lessons learned.

I will focus on the practical aspects of getting this to work, with photographs and examples from real cases.

This session describes a lightweight approach to code reviews used in co-located and geographically distributed agile teams. It covers lessons learned from several agile projects: real value, best practices and pitfalls of code reviews. The presentation explains how to make code reviews effective, relatively painless, and liked by the team. Moreover, it presents some interesting aspects of code reviews growing beyond their original intention. The session includes a demo on how Atlassian Crucible integrated with leading IDEs via Atlassian IDE Connector facilitates the whole process.

Today’s developers are quick to adopt leading-edge technologies that can accommodate project peaks and valleys, evolve and change, and support agile principles. Using the CollabNet platform, this session will demonstrate the agile best practice of continuous integration (CI) using cloud provisioning capabilities and the Hudson open source CI engine. Attendees will learn a framework that can be used in their environment, including an understanding of the components, tools, set up, and generalized use cases for development in both virtual private clouds and public clouds, like Amazon EC2.

W. Edwards Deming identified performance appraisal as one of the Seven Deadly Diseases of Management.

But annual appraisals are currently a fact of life in most organizations, in spite of their negative effects. Many companies are reluctant to give them up, because they don’t see what to do instead of the annual review.

I’ll walk through the assumptions behind performance evaluation and review, and share some of the recent research on the efficacy of annual reviews. Then I’ll offer alternatives that actually help people improve and build stronger relationships.